There was one more place he wanted to see, and it was no more than a hundred yards from the com center, if he recalled the aerial photographs correctly. Watching for any sign of security measures, he walked silently to the southwest, in and out of shrubbery and trees. He crossed the lawn of another large house, this one dark, and went on for another fifty yards before stopping.
Ham looked around. It could be in either direction. Suddenly, he stood stock-still. Although he was in an area that appeared to be deserted, hairs were standing up on the back of his neck. He could almost smell somebody in the area. In fact, he realized, he did smell something. It was cigarette smoke, and he didn’t know from which direction it came. He stood frozen, his eyes open wide. Afraid to use the flashlight, he turned his head from right to left. Then he saw it. Not ten feet from where he stood, the end of a cigarette glowed in the dark. Then it grew brighter and revealed a head.
Ham did not move, afraid of appearing in the man’s peripheral vision. They were too far apart for the knife, so Ham slowly eased the pistol from his belt and waited. A minute passed, then two. Finally, the man dropped the cigarette and ground it out with his foot. He appeared to be dressed in camouflage fatigues.
The man moved forward a few steps and vanished. Ham blinked. Where had he gone? As quietly as he could, he walked to the tree the man had been leaning against, stood behind it and surveyed the ground on the other side of it. Perhaps twelve feet ahead, he saw a dim light on the ground. He walked very slowly toward it, keeping an eye out for the man, and stopped a pace away, looking down.
What he was looking at, he realized, was a light shining through netting. Silently, Ham lay down on the ground and put his face against the netting. He could see the light now, and it illuminated the inside of a hole in the ground. He saw a man’s foot and then a steel ammunition box. Shifting slightly, he was able to see more. The man was wearing a headset attached to a small cassette player or radio. He was sitting on a camp stool next to a heavy automatic weapon, the barrel of which protruded through the camouflage netting. Ham reckoned the ammo was larger than fifty caliber. There was nothing else to see here. He backed away from the netting, got to his feet and disappeared into the nearby woods.
Half an hour later, he was back in the water, pushing the whaler out into the creek. Half an hour after that, he was back home, with a story to tell.
CHAPTER
52
Rita turned up on time for work at Palmetto Gardens, her second day on the job. She hooked up with Carla, and this time they were assigned to clean shops. She looked longingly at the security building—that was most where she wanted to plant one of her bugs, but instead, she was put to work in a jewelry store across the street.
She was surprised by the elaborate nature of the merchandise in the shop’s cases. As she sprayed the glass top of a counter and wiped it clean, she gazed at a diamond necklace that would not have been embarrassed to be in a showcase at Tiffany’s in New York. Counting the stones quickly, she estimated that the necklace contained at least twenty carats of diamonds, none of them small.
Carla sent her to clean the office, and she disturbed a man who was taking still more jewelry out of a large safe. As he closed the steel door she caught sight of two stacks of cash on the top shelf. Apparently, the shop’s customers didn’t bother with credit cards or checks.
The two women cleaned two more shops, then broke for lunch. They sat on a bench outside and ate their sandwiches, chatting idly about Carla’s children and grandchildren.
“What’s in there?” Rita asked, nodding at the security station.
“Security guards,” Carla said.
“You ever clean in there?”
“Sure, a bunch of times.”
“They got a toilet?”
“Yeah, I’ve cleaned it.”
“I’ll be right back,” Rita said. She got up, walked across the street, carrying her cleaning supplies, and walked through the front door.
A young man sat on a stool at a high desk. “We already got cleaning people in here today,” he said.
“I know,” Carla replied. “I just want to use your bathroom, is that okay?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” the man said. He pointed. “It’s right down the hall, there. It’s coed, so you better lock the door.”
Rita walked down the hall and into a small bathroom. Quickly, she retrieved the canister that Bob had given her, removed the bugs, and put them under a rag in the plastic carrier that contained her cleaning supplies. She left the bathroom and looked around. Dead ahead of her was a communications station, and a large, red-haired, mean-looking man sat at it, reading a gun magazine. He looked up and stared at her, smiling, until she walked away. Apart from that, there was only the hallway; there was nowhere to place a bug. She went back to the front door. “Thanks,” she said to the man at the desk, then left the building.
Well, shit, she thought to herself. That was a waste of effort. She had four bugs and nowhere to plant them. Then her luck changed. A truck came down the street and stopped in front of the security station. Two men got out, went to the rear and started to remove a steel desk from the back of the truck. Rita got up and walked across the street, carrying her plastic carryall.
“You guys need a hand?” she asked.
“Nah, we got it,” one of the men replied. They set the desk on the ground.
“Wait a minute,” she said, “Let me give it a wipe.” She grabbed a spray container and a rag from her carryall and palmed a bug.
“Don’t worry about it,” the man said, waving her off.
“It’s filthy,” Rita said, spraying cleaning fluid all over the desktop. “Where’s it been, in the warehouse?”
“C’mon, lady, you’re holding us up,” the man said.
Rita began wiping the desktop clean, while with her other hand she gripped the edge of the desk. Just for a moment, she got the hand all the way under the desktop, and the magnetic bug took hold. “There you go,” she said. She went back to her bench and watched them move the desk into the building.
Then her heart stopped. In order to get the desk through the front door of the building, the two men had turned the desk on its side. There, in plain view, was the bug she had planted. The security officer at the desk came to the door to help get the desk through, and as they wrestled it through the door, his face was within a foot of the bug. Finally they disappeared inside, and she could no longer see the desk.
“Let’s get back to work,” Rita said to Carla. For the first time, Rita began to think about how she might get out of Palmetto Gardens, if she had to. She thought about it as they cleaned the next shop, and she came up with absolutely nothing. There was nothing to do but finish the day’s work and hope no one had seen the bug on the desk.
At three o’clock, Rita and Carla got back on the bus. It was not until that moment that it occurred to Rita that, at the service gate, she would be searched again. And she still had three bugs. She couldn’t leave them in the carryall, because somebody else might get it the next day and discover the bugs.
“You got any Kleenex?” Rita asked Carla as they reached the back gate and started to get off the bus.